


Tradition

by milverton



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Chair Sex, Friends to Lovers, M/M, New Year's Eve, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 13:32:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17245130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milverton/pseuds/milverton
Summary: Holmes and I spent our eighth and most memorable Hogmanay together in that dismal and whirlwind year, 1888. I remember the day vividly, even after all these years: the uncharacteristic quiet of London, repellent to revellers because of a biting and bitter cold, the delicious burn of whiskey down my throat, the licking warmth of the fireplace and, what remains most colourful in my mind’s eye, a young and wiry Holmes.





	Tradition

Holmes and I spent our eighth and most memorable Hogmanay together in that dismal and whirlwind year, 1888. I remember the day vividly, even after all these years: the uncharacteristic quiet of London, repellent to revellers because of a biting and bitter cold, the delicious burn of whiskey down my throat, the licking warmth of the fireplace and, what remains most colourful in my mind’s eye, a young and wiry Holmes.

Our stalwart armchairs pushed aside, Holmes and I sat on the bearskin hearthrug, he with his long legs outstretched toward the fire, hands propping up from behind, and I in Indian-style. At such a close proximity, I could smell shag tobacco on Holmes’s clothes and lavender on his skin.

At the start of the evening, we opened a bottle of whiskey and by the natural progression of things one bottle became two. I had never known Holmes to be an avid drinker of spirits and silently marvelled that he was in his cups that night.

“One must keep one’s spirits up by pouring the spirits down,” Holmes had quipped in his mystifying way of knowing precisely what I was thinking without me saying a word aloud. My mind had indeed often been wending to the tribulations of the year and back to the present. Holmes was too right; it had been a year that merited a peaty descent (or any flavour of descent) into numbing oblivion.

To Holmes, it was the year that birthed the mother of all failures: the Irene Adler affair. Holmes wasn’t accustomed to being bested, proud man that he is, and it smarted. Not long thereafter were the grotesque Whitechapel murders, still very fresh in our minds that day, the fifth victim murdered a month prior and a sixth possible victim killed just a week before. The killer, until this day, remains unknown. Holmes claims Scotland Yard bungled the evidence to the point of no return, called him in too late for a consultation, but was self-abasing for many years for his inability to track down the deranged “Jack the Ripper.” (I never put the case to paper for the sake of Holmes’s ego [it was also unsatisfying for everyone involved to leave readers with an unfinished case]. In any event, my account would have been but a mere drop in the bucket, since nearly every paper and rag chronicled the case in prodigious detail.)

On a personal level, my practice had seen the loss of several patients to consumption, and their deaths had disheartened me enormously. Although I tried my hardest to combat the illness, it is a cross I will always bear. Less devastatingly, it was also the year Holmes and I met Mary Morstan. In part, I regretted not having made any amorous overtures to her when I had the chance, for I couldn’t imagine finding another woman quite as refined and humble. On the other hand, I was relieved I had not. Mostly, after letting Mary slip through my fingers, I felt fatalistic about my prospects for love. It’s true I had had numerous infatuations and dalliances across several continents without taking the sacramental leap and had not felt so discouraged, but that was in the halcyon years of my youth. As I grew older, I became increasingly concerned about my future domestic arrangement and, by association, my enthusiasm (or lack thereof) for courting the fairer sex.

For these reasons, on that especial Hogmanay, Holmes and I tried our best not to reflect upon the past year.

An hour to midnight, we settled upon the neutral and pertinent subject of New Year’s traditions as practiced by my Scottish ancestors and which were, by that year, _de rigueur_ throughout England.

“My mother was a highly superstitious woman,” I told Holmes. “She felt it necessary to practice many of the traditions, especially the first-footing. Do you know of it?”

Holmes flexed his thin, bare feet against the fire. “I can’t say that I do.”

“It was thought that the first person to cross the threshold of your home after midnight carrying gifts to represent prosperity, good health, warmth, and cheer would bring good fortune for the year. A handsome, tall, dark-haired man was favoured as the fortune-bringer, while fair-haired men--who evoked the image of Viking invaders--were thought to bring bad luck.”

Holmes’s eyes glittered dancingly in the firelight. “In my experience, fair-haired men bring anything but bad luck. Quite the contrary.”

It took a moment, perhaps due to my faculties being slowed by drink, but I soon understood he was referring to me and felt my cheeks flush. I took a great gulp of whiskey and felt emboldened to return a compliment to him.

“And if we were to put that tradition into practice, I think,” I said, forgetting myself and sweeping my gaze along his body, “we would need not search far and wide for a handsome, tall, dark-haired man.”

Holmes’s lips twitched, then one corner quirked upwards. He looked at me playfully from the corner of his eye. “Now, Watson, Mrs Hudson is hardly a handsome, dark-haired man. You do her a disservice.”

I barked out a laugh, and in turn spilled whiskey from the glass in my hand onto my freshly laundered white nightshirt. I looked down at the offending spots of liquid detestfully.

“Damn.”

“My dear man, you're reckless,” Holmes teased, reaching over and, with a spindly finger, wiping away a fleck of whiskey from my neck. I watched, transfixed, as he brought the pad of that same finger to his mouth and touched the tip of his tongue to it.

Holmes slipped the finger shallowly into his mouth, his lips enclosing it, and hummed consideringly. He removed the finger and drawled, “I rather wish that could be bottled.”

I was rendered speechless, and was growing warm due to the drink, the fire, and, without question and most of all, because of Holmes.

“Do tell me more about these superstitions,” Holmes said, seemingly blithely unaware of the effect he was having on me. “They’re very amusing.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, of course, I suppose--I suppose I shall,” I said, prattling like a fool. I was not to pay any mind to Holmes’s queer behaviour. It was simply Holmes being Holmes, I reasoned to myself, his idiosyncrasies heightened by drink. “Did you know it was also believed that what you were doing on midnight would reflect what you’d be doing for the rest of the year?”

“Is that right?” Holmes said with mocking cheeriness.

“And ashes from a fire were meant to be swept away before--”

Holmes suddenly pushed himself upright and faced me, mirroring my Indian-style sitting position. “Do you believe in any of this hoary balderdash?” he asked, sharp and vexed.

I was taken off guard by the vagaries of his attitude. "No...not quite.”

Holmes looked relieved. “Thank goodness.”

“But it really is not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of the preservation of tradition.”

Holmes wrinkled his nose like his smelled something afoul. “Tradition?”

“Tradition,” I affirmed.

Holmes was watching me with anewed intensity, in the way he oft looked at a corpse that begot a conundrum.

“Would you consider yourself a very...traditional man, Watson?”

“Somewhat, yes. Why, yes. At least somewhat,” I chuntered.

Holmes was still vibrating with intensity. “Do elaborate.”

“Well. I suppose I revere our great institutions."

"Ah, yes." Holmes held out a hand, began ticking off his fingers. My eyes were drawn to his long, elegant appendages immediately. "The military."

I sat up taller, held my head high. "Unquestionably."

"The Crown."

"Undoubtedly."

"Marriage."

I hesitated perhaps a moment too long, because Holmes said pawkily, "Please, do tone down your enthusiasm."

A question then came tumbling out of my mouth, unbidden. "Do you think I would make a good husband, Holmes?"

I had not wanted to dredge up matrimonial thoughts, but it had been weighing so heavily on my mind that evening that it was only a matter of time until I could no longer carry it.

“Watson,” said Holmes softly, “you are one of the most brave, wise, kind, and charming men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. These qualities would be exceedingly favourable for your chosen life partner.”

This litany of superlatives caused the back of my eyes to prickle with tears. Holmes rarely spoke so freely or with such approbation. “Do you really think that?”

“If I did not, I would not have said it,” Holmes said abruptly.

I was immensely moved by his speech, and felt an overpowering urge to be closer to him. I inched close enough until our knees were touching and took Holmes’s hand and held it in mine.

Holmes looked down blankly at our enjoined hands.

“You may not think yourself the marrying type, Holmes, but I think you would make a wonderful life mate,” I said, although Holmes had not asked for my opinion on the matter. “Your genius and sense of justice, your selfless concern for others: only the luckiest of persons would be tethered to you.”

Holmes was still staring at our hands. “Said no one ever on this earthly plane,” he murmured.

“Said I!” I boomed, causing Holmes to flinch and grasp my hand tight. “Do I count for nothing?”

Holmes brought our clasped hands close to his heart, looked up at me and said, with unvarnished sincerity, “Watson, you count for everything.”

I realised, then, why I had not asked for Mary’s hand in marriage. Or why I had not attempted to court the fairer sex since I met Holmes. More basically, I realised why, in all the years stretching back to my youth, my eyes occasionally strayed to appraise the male physique and craved a man’s carnal touch (a clinical fascination, I had reasoned with myself, nothing more; I dared not give voice to any other possibility).

I was in love with Holmes. And I had been in love with him for a very long time.

That was the first time I felt the love so viscerally that it threatened to claw its way out of the recesses of my body and make itself known to all.

Thus, it was due to that freed beast of desire (and partly because of my state of inebriation) that I boldly bridged the tenuous gap between us to place a kiss on Holmes’s lips.

His lips were chapped and whiskey-sweet. He kissed back without hesitation and his lack of technique was made up for in fervour; he kissed like a man parched, my lips, the fountain.

When we at last parted to breathe, Holmes got to his knees and swept aside his dressing-gown to throw a leg over my lap and sit astride me. I fell to my back and brought him down with me and we continued to kiss--open-mouthed and hungry. For a moment, he hovered above me on all fours, and I reached up to frame his angular, intelligent face as he looked down at me with shining eyes and kiss-swollen lips.

“John,” he breathed, his unexpected use of my Christian name causing my heart to flutter, “I am not a traditional man.”

I ran a hand through his soft hair. “I would not want you to be anything else.”

Holmes sat down on my groin and experimentally rocked against me. I groaned in desperation. “Evidence suggests that you aren’t either.”

I smiled saucily as I ran a hand up an athletic thigh and raised my hips. “What ever gave me away?”

Holmes leaned down with dark eyes, but pulled back mere moments after a feather-light touch of our lips. I was alarmed to see that his expression had turned cold and distant.

I opened my mouth to apologise for whatever it was I’d done wrong, but Holmes spoke first, in a monotone. “Once we venture down this path, I will not, under any circumstances, be able to return to a platonic state of affairs. You must be certain that you wish to expand the frontier of our relationship in this manner.”

I laughed nervously. “I couldn’t possibly be more certain, Holmes. I have had ample time to think about it: nearly 8 years, in fact.”

Holmes flitted his eyes over my face, as if searching for some kind of physical marking there that belied my statement.

Holmes narrowed his eyes. “Is that so?”

I took his hand and gently kissed the back of it. “It is very much so.”

Holmes pulled his hand out of mine and unclamped one of my braces and unbuttoned my shirt with the other hand, employing a level of dexterity that was so typically Holmesian. In no time, he was onto the last button, which he undid with a flourish.

“Sit up,” he demanded.

I did as requested, and he got to his knees and pulled my shirt overhead. The subsequent investigative touch of nimble fingers on my bare skin was incendiary and calming all the same--he skimmed up my chest, skated gently over my webbed scar, moved behind me to explore my back, and I closed my eyes and lost myself in his sensuous exploration. I had never been touched like I was an object of fascination; like an object worthy of reverence.

“John,” Holmes breathed into my ear, then kissed a spot just behind it. “You are quite something--beautiful, if I may say so.”

“I’ll allow that,” I said jokingly, though I was stunned to hear him say so. It was not a word I would ascribe to myself.

“I wish to see all of you.”

“Let us first be on even ground,” I said, turning around and reaching for his shirt. “I have not yet seen any of you.”

“You’re intolerably slow,” he said as I helped him out of his shirt with teasing calm. He slapped my hand away and attended to disrobing himself, his rushed desperation causing me to smile, and tore the shirt off to reveal an expanse of alabaster with prominent bone and sinew. I wonderingly ran my hands up his torso, which was sparse of hair, and when I paused to fondle his nipples with my thumbs, he made the prettiest noise.

“Armchair,” Holmes said, unusually taciturn, standing up without any grace and offering a hand to me. I took his hand and he hoisted me up, immediately set to removing my trousers and drawers while Holmes removed his own.

Once we were both in the altogether, I took Holmes by his trim waist and pulled him close, aching to feel his body pressed against mine. With one hand, I grabbed the kissing pricks quashed between our bodies and frigged us with febrile need, and with the other hand, I kneaded Holmes’s small but pert buttock.

“ _Oh_ ,” Holmes said into my jaw, where he had been dotting kisses.

I kissed his throat and my finger found its way between his buttocks. He moaned wantonly, a sound so foreign to the Holmes I knew but so entirely welcome, and bucked his hips up into my fist. Soon he was manoeuvring us toward my armchair, pushing me so that I fell down onto the cushion, then climbing onto my lap.

He took hold of my sex with one spidery hand and stroked.

“John,” Holmes panted, “there is nothing I would like to do more at this very moment than to fuck myself on your prick.”

Half-sedate with the euphoria engendered by his ministrations, I slurred a, “Please, yes, my god, yes. Have you an aid?”

Holmes’s hand left my prick and he climbed off me with great alacrity. I was so attracted and enraptured by the shift of his buttocks as he retreated to his bedroom, and then by his engorged member slapping obscenely against his stomach as he made a hasty return to me. He had acquired pomade, which he slathered generously onto my prick, then applied some inside himself. I opened my legs wide as he turned around and positioned himself betwixt my thighs, lined my cockhead with his opening. I placed my hands on each protruding hip bone to help guide him as he very slowly sank down onto me.

It was so grippingly tight--tighter than a woman--and warm inside. The added pressure to my aroused prick was unspeakably divine.

“Good god,” I said in awe as I became fully sheathed within Holmes. I marveled at our union, him stretched around me, the long expanse of his lithe body above me.

Holmes had been concerningly quiet throughout, so I ran a comforting hand up his back, a terrain of spine nubs, and kissed a freckle. “Are you all right, my darling? Is it painful?”

“Yes,” Holmes said, his voice a ragged whisper.

My muddled brain took a moment to catch up. “Yes, it’s all right? Or yes it’s painful?”

“It is painful, but all right.”

I noticed Holmes’s erection had flagged slightly, so I reached around and coaxed it back to full hardness, employing techniques that I often used onanistically. As his prick grew hotter and heavier in my hand, he was emboldened to lift himself up and descend back to the root. Then again, and once more. It was so very deliberate and slow; my patience was tried until I could not stand it anymore.

“Sherlock,” I growled. “Fuck me.”

Holmes grunted with assent and began to frig himself on me, each downslide more energetic than the next, his buttocks connecting to my pelvis, the propulsions causing the armchair to slide incrementally backwards.

I could feel myself racing precipitously to release--it was not in the cards for me to last very long--and all too soon I spent myself inside Holmes.

As I remained boneless in the armchair, Holmes carefully unseated himself, my eyes glazing over at the sight of my seed dripping down the back of his thigh.

“Let me touch you,” I said drunkenly.

“Be quick, my man. I can’t stand it,” Holmes said, breathless, turning around and climbing needily atop me, all limbs, kissing me sloppily.

He did not need much more encouragement either--I rigorously brought him off with my hand and he spilled over my chest with a rich moan.

Afterwards, we remained still for a few moments, our foreheads together, our chests rising and falling in tandem. He climbed off me to retrieve wet cloths to clean our soiled selves.

We moved to sit side by side on the settee with a woolen blanket swathing us, Holmes resting his head on my shoulder. It was pure bliss. We had sat on that settee numerous times sharing that very same blanket, but never so close nor so spiritually connected and peaceful. I could not wait for new memories in the same vein--memories we would make together in 221b in the coming year as not only friends, but lovers.

In that moment, it all seemed so foolish to have fretted over marriage and Mary. Simply, neither had been for me. Marriage was for many a man and the man--or woman--who took Mary’s heart was a lucky one. I was to take another path. Not a typical one in the least, but one that was my own. And one that I’d started out on all those years before that night, when I met Holmes.

“Watson,” Holmes murmured.

“Mm?” I said, my eyes sliding closed.

“It’s far past midnight.”

My eyes opened. We had lost track of time, so absorbed in each other were we. I kissed the top of Holmes’s sweaty head. “Happy New Year, my dearest.”

“And to you,” Holmes said, nuzzling into my neck. “I do hope one of Scots traditions is true.”

“Do you?” I said with some surprise.

“I rather hope what I was doing at midnight reflects what I’ll be doing for the rest of the year.”

I grinned.

1889 was to be the best year yet.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all have a very happy, healthy New Year!
> 
> I should also mention I stole the excellent quote "keeping spirits up by pouring the spirits down" from a Victorian era ghost story called "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," published 1851, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.


End file.
